Saturday, December 28, 2013

Why is this book typeset in “ragged
right” rather than “justified”? Beats me. Mostly, it’s not
noticeable, but at times, it’s sloppily done, with large gaps on
the right that would easily accommodate the next word, and tremendous
inconsistency with regard to hyphenation. Why mention it? It’s an
odd choice that, to some readers, will stand out; also, in a book so
concerned with technological innovation, the nefarious uses of
technology, and the thoughtlessness with which some changes are
embraced, the typesetting decision looks like what Eggers warns
against: sloppy thinking in service to some ideal.

I hadn’t finished an Eggers novel
before this one; I read perhaps a quarter of A Heartbreaking Work
of Staggering Genius before losing interest. This novel does have
a page-turning quality to it—enough of a narrative drive is
generated, once you’re past the slow and uncompelling opening
scenes—so one can move through it pretty quickly. With the
exception of a few scenes in which descriptive writing takes over
(often in ways that feel force-fed with symbolism and significance),
the story is carried by dialogue. It’s not especially good
dialogue. Everyone has the same voice, and only one character ever
asks the questions an intelligent reader would ask. The main
character is not only charmless, she’s a cypher. It’s possible
that that’s what Eggers intends, given how she never makes a single
good decision. (I’m not sure I’ve read another novel of which I
could say that of the main character; I think even Humbert Humbert
probably makes a few good decisions, or at least defensible ones.)
This quality of hers may be why she’s hired, promoted, and
successful.

In short: Mae is brought in, via an old
friend, Annie, to work for The Circle, a Google/Facebook stand-in
that has a cool campus in California and outsized ambitions to change
the world using online technology. Mae quickly learns that one
doesn’t merely work for The Circle; rather, one joins a community—a
community that doesn’t like being snubbed and that wants to know
everything about her. That, of course, becomes the tension-generating
pivot around which the story turns, though Eggers’s handling of the
technology isn’t convincing (Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
does a better job of leaping several minutes into the future by way
of Google while also feeling more grounded in tech-type thinking).
There’s an interesting question at the heart of this book about
knowing and being known, but the big moments are telegraphed, the
insights are blunt, and the book’s set-up is so gradual and
surface-level, it felt to me as if Eggers needed to rethink at least
the opening in light of where he was going to take the character,
shaping the narrative more subtly.

Fifty years ago, or even twenty, this
novel would be a satire. For their times, 1984 and Fahrenheit
451 and Brave New World were satires, taking real things
to their next level as a way of critiquing them. This book, at this
time, can’t find anything to satirize. Mostly, Eggers describes
things as they already are. The sole satirical element, to my eyes,
was the proliferation of screens on our protagonist’s desk. “No
one told you about monitoring your third screen? Here,”—and
another computer screen is hauled within view. The way in which
information is thuddingly and incongruously dropped into our
protagonist’s lap seems the stuff of comedy, but it comes across as
flat, especially since Mae simply yields to whatever is thrown at
her.

I did enjoy the novel, but it’s not
an especially well-crafted thing. Fittingly, it seems to be getting
the critical praise it was crowd-designed to earn, but I was happy to
see that citizen reviewers weren’t quite so impressed. It’s light
entertainment with some half-considered ideas and no real surprises.

Friday, December 27, 2013

As if to prove my lack of pulp and SF
cred: I had not read this book before.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first John
Carter adventure, A Princess of Mars was originally serialized
as Under the Moons of Mars. I prefer that more evocative title
(the moons being an oft-referenced motif in the story), though in
fact, A Princess of Mars suits the resulting story better—and
identifies one of the novel’s two chief faults.

The tale starts well enough, and I was
familiar with the beginning (or at least its most necessary elements)
from the Marvel Comics adaptation from the 1970s. Trapped in a cave
by a group of hostile Apache, one-time Confederate officer John
Carter steps out of his body and is transported to the planet Mars.
Burroughs does a wonderful job setting up his premise, providing
teasing bits of information in advance, creating tense scenes, and
capturing our hero’s confusion at each turn of events. Then there’s
the implied subtext of the novel, with the Native/white man conflict
in the U.S. providing a lead-in to warring species on Mars learning
to cooperate through John Carter’s intervention (though largely
they cooperate in slaughtering other peoples). Though the green,
gigantic, tusked, four-armed Martians and the red-skinned, human-like
Martians seem to each contain components of Native Americans, the
green folks get the sorry end of the comparison, with their communal
rearing of children, pragmatic dispatching of the disabled, and their
warlike ways seen as barbaric in contrast with the culture of the red
Martians, who only make war when they need to. However, by the time
the book wraps up, it becomes evident that the culture is not its
people, and green Martians aren’t innately bad, just badly led. I’m
sure someone’s written a dissertation on how ERB distributes good
and bad traits among the various Martian peoples.

I have no idea what the idea is behind
the white Martian apes, who, like the green Martians, claim
squatters’ rights in the ancient abandoned cities but only show up
when the plot requires it.

The story’s main weaknesses are two:
the Dejah Thoris thread, and the shaggy construction of the novel’s
second half. Once the beautiful Dejah Thoris enters the narrative,
John Carter is in love; not a terribly well-defined character prior
to this, he now becomes focused on the source of his adoration, and
thus his mood shifts depending on his reading of the moods of his
beloved. It’s exhausting and not terribly interesting, and
Burroughs withholds information so that he can provide us with some
late-story entanglements that could have easily been avoided. Also,
though the princess gets some bold speeches to indicate her
self-regard, she’s a less interesting character than Carter—and
somewhat petty emotionally. (This is repaired in the 2012 film
version, though the movie was lumbered with a poor choice for its
lead and a jumpy narrative.)

There comes a point where the story
lapses fully into pulpiness in the style of A.E. Van Vogt’s Slan,
with psychic powers that come and go, convenient coincidences in
every scene, and the clear case of a writer merely chattering away
(and sending his characters lurching about) until he’s filled his
word quota. Certain fight scenes which seem crucial get rushed as if
Burroughs lost interest, while other moments drag out as he works to
tie up the many narrative threads. The story does become vivid again
near the end, setting up the reader marvelously for further
adventures and intentionally leaving several elements unexplained and
unresolved.

All-in-all, a mixed bag, but worth it
for the premise, the sporadic strong scenes, and the many flights of
invention.

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Who?

At a small independent school, I teach ESL; I've taught 11th-grade English, AP Literature, and creative writing. My short stories have appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, and in 2006 I won the Zoetrope: All-Story annual short fiction prize. My poetry and nonfiction have appeared in various journals.